The Fruitless Debate Over Meddling in Foreign Protests

The real reason not to meddle in these protests is that the U.S. should refuse to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries on principle.

Michael Rubin complains that the Biden administration is not speaking out forcefully enough in support of Iranian and Chinese protesters:

China’s protests caught the White House by surprise. America’s “near-peer” competitor and top military threat hobbled, at least temporarily, by widespread protests was not something the State Department or the intelligence community’s top China hands expected.

The Biden administration’s response was weak.

This is the same tedious debate that we have every few years whenever large protests take place in another country. The pattern is very familiar by this point. Protests against an authoritarian or semi-authoritarian government begin, Western pundits immediately embrace the protesters’ cause as if it were their own (no matter what the original cause of the protests may be), and then the administration issues some vague statement of support for the protesters and the right to protest. Soon after that, hawks decry the administration’s statements as “weak” in an attempt to goad the administration into doing “more” to back the protests. Then the protests peter out after a few months or a year and we wait to do it all again in another couple of years.